Some of Princeton's top brains have divergent ideas about fortifying the
security of the Internet, with Larry Peterson offering the Global
Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) as a much-needed platform for
investigating and validating potential security solutions. Peterson says
GENI is particularly important as a tool that would allow the research
community to significantly shape the Internet's future and counter
industry's increasingly pervasive influence. He believes the network
offers the optimum path for tackling the Internet's security challenges,
arguing that "the network needs to be able to quarantine compromised
machines so that we can limit their collateral damage." Edward Felten,
director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, focuses
on short-term, high-impact research, and is convinced that many of the
Internet's security problems can be traced to how technology is used rather
than the technology itself. Ruby Lee, who heads the Princeton Architecture
Lab for Multimedia and Security, stresses that security should be an
element of system design, and wants to embed basic security features within
hardware. Her lab has demonstrated that such an innovation can be
accomplished without hiking up the hardware's power consumption or
impacting its performance. Felten does not agree with Peterson and Lee's
contention that online security can be adequately shored up by trust
features incorporated into hardware or networks, while Princeton computer
scientist and GENI participant Jennifer Rexford sees advantages to
approaches espoused by all three researchers. "GENI would really open up
the intellectual space in thinking about the Internet," she says, even as
she works on incremental security enhancements such as the improvement of
routing protocols.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

IBM scientists are researching the possibility of creating nanotube-based
data storage devices and microprocessors by arranging carbon nanotubes into
arrays with DNA molecules. "These are DNA nanostructures that are
self-assembled into discrete shapes," says IBM scientist Greg Wallraff.
"What we are really making are tiny DNA circuit boards that will be used to
assemble other components." The IBM effort is based on "DNA origami"
research conducted by the California Institute of Technology's Paul
Rothemund. Although the technology is still in the preliminary stages, a
growing number of researchers believe that designer DNA could be used to
create self-assembling computer components. Self-assembly would allow the
intrinsic chemical and physical properties of molecules, along with
environmental factors, to guide the raw materials into complex structures.
The challenge is in getting raw materials to behave in a precise and
orderly manner, which is why DNA is being used. DNA consists of specific
chemical bases that bind and react in somewhat predictable ways. In DNA
assembly, a scientist would create scaffolds of designer DNA that are
manipulated into specific shapes. When nanotubes are added to the process,
interactions between the DNA and the nanotubes would cause the nanotubes to
be assembled into a desired pattern. Chips made through such procedures
could have features as small as two nanometers.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Women in the high-tech industry like their jobs, but they have more
concerns about their relationship with supervisors than men, as well as men
and women in other fields, according to a new Catalyst study. In addition
to the way they interact with supervisors, women in IT cite the inability
to offer suggestions during the decision-making process as a challenge.
"In high-tech organizations people who have great technical skill often
advance into managerial roles, and while these folks may be stellar
technicians, they are often not given the support and training to enable
them to be equally good managers," says Catalyst's Debbie Soon. Catalyst
based its study on employee-satisfaction surveys from 21 global high-tech
companies and an online study of nearly 500 respondents. Women often noted
that their supervisors were not available when needed, did not provide
regular feedback, and did not respond to suggestions. IT companies would
do well to offer face-to-face training for managers and programs that focus
on different leadership styles.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Microsoft has announced DreamSpark, a program that will provide students
with free access to some of the company's most popular software development
tools. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says past efforts to create education
discounts limited the number of students that could use the programs, but
DreamSpark could reach as many as 1 billion students. DreamSpark will
allow students to download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software
development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design
and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; XNA Game Studio 2.0,
a video game development program; SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition; and
Windows Server Standard Edition. "It's a brilliant strategic move on the
part of Microsoft," says analyst Chris Swenson. "This is one of the core
audiences you have to hit if you really want to make a difference in the
rich Internet application market going forward." Analysts say that
distributing free copies of its tools increases the chances that a
Microsoft product will be used to develop the next big Web 2.0 craze, and
could also help convince a generation of programmers to move away from open
source software. DreamSpark will be made available to high school students
around the world starting in the fall, and to college students in other
countries starting next year.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

One Laptop Per Child has delivered thousands of $187 laptops to children
in the developing world, has 500,000 machines in its pipeline, and is
producing as many as 110,000 units per month, said OLPC co-founder Nicholas
Negroponte during his keynote address at the American Academy for the
Advancement of Science's annual meeting. Negroponte said that OLPC will
lower the cost to its target of $100 before the end of 2009, and by 2011
the price will fall to $50. He said the idea is to apply Moore's Law to
pricing. "If you make anything electronic today, you know that 18 months
from today it will cost you half of what it does today," he said. "But if
you make [electronics], you have no interest in that product being half
price in 18 months." He noted that companies add electronic extras such as
cameras and MP3 players, and likened laptops to SUVs that need energy to
move the vehicle rather than people. Big rollouts of OLPC computers in
Peru, Uruguay, and Nigeria are scheduled for the coming months. Negroponte
added that OLPC is forming partnerships and making changes that will allow
other companies to come aboard and help make inexpensive laptops more
widely available.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Microsoft researchers are working to make it easier to distribute useful
pieces of information such as software updates and patches by designing the
updates to behave more like computer worms, spreading from computer to
computer instead of having to be individually downloaded from a central
server. The research used to develop such a technique may also help defend
against malicious worms. Software worms spread by infecting a computer,
self-replicating, and probing computers to find a new host. Microsoft
research Milan Vojnovic says that method is inefficient because the worm
wastes time exploring groups, or "subnets" of computers that contain few
uninfected hosts. Vojnovic and his team have designed smarter strategies.
The ideal approach would be to use prior knowledge of how uninfected
computers are distributed on a subnet, but a company distributing a patch
after a worm attack rarely has such extensive information. To compensate,
the researchers have developed strategies that would allow their beneficial
worms to learn from experience. A worm starts by contacting a potential
new host, and after finding one uses a targeted approach to contact other
computers on the same subnet. If the worm finds many uninfected hosts it
stays on the subnet, but if most computers have already been updated, it
switches subnets. Software patches that spread like worms could be faster
and easier to distribute, and better countermeasures can be developed by
understanding how malicious worms spread.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

North Carolina State University students are using IBM's Project Zero
programming framework to build Web 2.0 business applications. The project
includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP, as well as application
programming interfaces for creating representational state transfer Web
services, user interfaces, and mashups. Project Zero is available as a
plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment and in a version
for developers who prefer working from the command line. Project Zero is
not an open source project, although it does follow open source's
community-driven model. NCSU professor Munindar Singh says Project Zero's
rapid development framework has helped students focus on higher-level
issues surrounding application development. IBM's Mark Hanny says the
needs of the IT industry are changing. "Professors are spending a lot more
time helping people at a higher level to be the architect, to be the
project managers," Hanny says. "These are the jobs that are in great
demand." IBM has also partnered with the University of California, Los
Angeles to create a class in which computer science students choose their
own Web 2.0 project and work with IBM mentors to complete it.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Computer scientists are using genetic algorithms to re-create the process
of evolution and solve some of the hardest problems researchers face today.
Researchers have used evolutionary principles to design airplane wings,
boat hulls, satellite antennae, robot vision, and electronic circuits.
Computer scientists can solve difficult problems by evolving solutions in a
virtual world. The solutions are often much different from anything human
engineers would have conceived, as they are occasionally hindered by
preconceived notions on how problems should be solved. A genetic algorithm
starts with a group of possible solutions and narrows the answers down to
the best solution by eliminating bad ideas and combining strong ideas until
the perfect solution evolves. Sometimes, the algorithm can go through
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of generations of solutions before
reaching a suitable answer. Still, although genetic algorithms have been
successful in many cases, they are not a universal problem solver. "They
are quite slow, and they require quite a bit of fiddling," says McGill
University professor Doina Precup. However, despite their drawbacks,
Universite de Montreal professor Michel Toulouse says they have sparked a
revolution in computer science. "The beauty and success of genetic
algorithms motivated other computer scientists to look to biology for
inspiration," Toulouse says.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Princeton graduate student J. Alex Halderman discussed ways to improve
e-voting machines during his keynote address at the ShmooCon computer
hacker conference. Halderman said that direct-recording electronic (DRE)
voting machines are essentially computers and are susceptible to the same
problems, including viruses, bugs, and crashes. Halderman said the most
troubling aspect of DRE machines is that a single person could launch an
attack on all the voting machines in a county or state. During a study of
Diebold DRE machines, Halderman found that the company provided potential
attackers with an upgrade process that was easy to manipulate. Using a
specific file name could allow a hacker to inject malicious code into one
or more voting machines, and because the PCMIA card can be used to load a
specific ballot within a precinct, county, or state, a single altered card
could spread the infection to numerous machines. Halderman said that
improvements to e-voting machines could make them reliable, which he said
would please voters, since many prefer using them over paper-based systems.
E-voting machines provide faster reporting, offer more accessibility to
disabled voters, and allow for better and less-expensive vote auditing if
paper receipts are added to the system.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Stanford computer scientists have developed Make3d, an algorithm that can
render accurate three-dimensional models from ordinary pictures. Make3d,
developed by computer science professor Andrew Ng and postdoctoral student
Ashutosh Saxena, uses data drawn from a set of images to relate the
relative depth of objects in various circumstances to properties of the
two-dimensional image. The depth data is used to extrapolate the relative
positions and shapes of objects in new photographs. "If you look at a
single image you will notice that some parts of the image relate to the
depth--for example, the sky is usually far away," Saxena says. "The
machine-learning algorithm, which is a branch of artificial intelligence,
learns the relations, so it learns the relation between the image and the
depth or the 3D structure." Ng says that until recently the concept was
considered to be technically impossible because of the difficulties in
differentiating two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects. Ng and
Saxena say the algorithm could be used to improve object detection for
complicated structures such as faces or moving objects, accelerate the
development of virtual worlds and characters for video games, or be used to
improve robotic navigation and dexterity. Ng says that future uses of the
algorithm could include modeling houses for real estate and modeling
fly-through views for applications such as Google Earth.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Technology that would enable computers to operate at faster speeds is the
focus of a new laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Founded in January, the Parallel Computing Lab will allow an
interdisciplinary group of researchers to pursue prototypes that would make
parallel computing more accessible to the average computer programmer.
Effective parallel programs have only been written by specialists, says lab
investigator Ras Bodik. Overheating computer cores was a problem
associated with improving the speed of computers until the emergence of
parallel computing. The technology could allow handheld devices such as
cell phones to replace laptop computers, enable people to browse YouTube in
minutes instead of hours, or help improve the understanding and diagnosis
of diseases. Microsoft and Intel recently said they will award UC Berkeley
a grant to pursue parallel computing research. "It's one of the biggest
changes in the computer industry in the last 30 years, which is why the
industry's paying attention to academic ideas quite a bit," Bodik says.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The obsolescence of technology goes hand in hand with its advancement, and
this represents a major problem to institutions that wish to preserve
knowledge recorded on storage media and formats that are rapidly becoming
outmoded, according to San Diego Supercomputer Center director Dr. Francine
Berman, whose Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation
will investigate the challenge over the next several years. The
maintenance of archaic computers is an expensive proposition, while a more
likely method is to migrate the data by upgrading the file format every
generation, but problems with this concept include who will foot the bill
for this service, according to Berman. Data accessibility and
sustainability models being discussed by task force members include a
pay-per-use model in which users would pay a fee to download old books and
other kinds of information; a privatized model whereby businesses that
already host files or images online agree to maintain them long-term; and a
public-good model in which preservation is underwritten by endowments or
governments. The NSF, the Library of Congress, and several other
organizations are supporting Berman's task force, with the NSF also
offering $100 million for five organizations to create a "DataNet" for
sustainable data preservation. The European Union's Planets project
describes itself as an attempt by several national libraries to save $4.3
billion in European data "at risk of digital obsolescence." Meanwhile,
computer experts recommend that households start backing up their files,
and it is a matter of preference which preservation format is best for each
household. "Only 10 to 30 percent of consumers back up their stuff, and
really it's closer to 10," warns CNet editor Natalie Del Conte.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A lack of definition in the enterprise IT field is a major reason why
women are so discouraged from pursuing careers in that sector, and former
Forrester Research analyst Laurie M. Orlov writes that an emphasis on
programming, robotics, engineering, and computer science obstructs the
actual nature of enterprise IT jobs and the skills and background they
necessitate. "Now you need business analysts, program managers, vendor
managers, relationship managers, information architects or process
analysts," she says. "These jobs (any of which can lead to CIO) demand
employees with excellent communication skills that many of the women you
know have: The ability to speak, negotiate, influence others, write,
analyze, manage projects or programs, and lead cultural change." What is
needed, Orlov argues, is the circulation of better information about
business technology's true nature and the various backgrounds successful
women in business technology can have, along with the backing and
participation of the 86 percent of top male IT executives. CIOs and senior
managers can give tech-centric personnel a better grounding in business so
that they can more effectively engage with other departments and recognize
the career paths that may swerve to and from their organization's business
areas. Orlov makes the case that senior women in IT should promote
business technology careers to young women in view of rising salaries,
companies' fervent desire for workforce diversity, the positions'
opportunity to give women an education on how companies function, and the
work-life balance IT jobs facilitate. Furthermore, women with IT jobs that
are gauged by deliverables know that the most valuable element of the job
is the work itself.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

European researchers working for the AtGentive project have developed two
new software platforms that incorporate artificial intelligence and social
networking into their approach toward e-learning. AtGentive coordinator
Thierry Nabeth says the first generation of e-learning platforms focused on
replicating the classroom experience, but student's often had difficulty
staying motivated and the learning program failed to keep their attention.
To overcome this problem, one of the AtGentive platforms uses techniques
similar to those found on Web sites such as Facebook that make them so
popular as a means of staying in touch with others. The platforms also use
artificial intelligence to keep students interested. "Artificial agents
are autonomous entities that observe users' activities and assess their
state of attention in order to intervene so as to make the user experience
more effective," Nabeth says. "The interventions can take many forms, from
providing new information to the student, guiding them in their work, or
alerting them when other users connect to the platform." The artificial
intelligence agents provide a smart form of proactive coaching for students
by assessing, guiding, and stimulating them. The agents can alert students
when others have read their articles, or when they receive feedback on
their contributions to a collaborative project. The agents are also able
to detect when students are not interacting with the system and try to get
them to rejoin the lesson.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

New software being developed by sports scientists at the University of
Edinburgh's Center for Aquatics Research and Education and Sheffield Hallam
University could provide instant, in-depth feedback to a swimmer's glide
technique, helping swimmers improve a key aspect of their performance more
quickly and effectively than previously possible. The software would
provide information on head position, body posture and alignment, and other
elements of a swimmer's technique. It could also actively suggest ways
swimmers could improve their posture to minimize resistance and pinpoint
the optimum moment to begin kicking. The researchers say the software's
advantages over other systems currently in use include the ability to
provide instant feedback so swimmers and coaches can use it at the poolside
and implement its recommendations while a training session is still in
progress. To use the program, a swimmer is marked at body joints using
water-resistant markers. The swimmer is then videotaped in action using
underwater and poolside cameras. The images are fed into a computer where
the software tracks the movements and runs them through a mathematical
model. A replay of the swim instantly appears on a poolside plasma screen.
The research is backed by funding from the Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Advanced Micro Devices says that developers need to rewrite software to
prepare for the multicore processors that will use a variety of cores in
the future. AMD has started talks with Microsoft and other partners, and
believes the work will ease the job of programming heterogeneous computer
microprocessors that mix x86, graphics, and other cores. "Over the next
few months or quarters, I think we will sharpen our views and put out a
proposal--and perhaps a consortium behind it," says AMD senior fellow Chuck
Moore, the chief architect of the initiative. "It's not just an AMD thing.
It's an open system, and lets other players innovate at different layers."
AMD believes software needs to be redefined in an open way similar to how
the Open Systems Interconnection stack redefined networking software in the
late 1970s. Establishing new levels of abstraction would allow
applications developers to write parallel programs without having to know
the details of every multicore processor. The new computer stack could
include an expanded set of runtime environments above the operating system
that could help find, schedule, synchronize, and manage chip-level
resources for applications programmers. Virtualization software could be
used below the operating system to track and correct programming errors
more efficiently.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Hackers were not responsible for the increase in the number of colleges
that reported computer-security incidents in 2007, according to a study
conducted by Adam D. Dodge, the assistant director for information security
at Eastern Illinois University. The study, which analyzed reports on
computer security by news and computer-security organizations, found that
while the number of colleges that reported computer-security incidents rose
from 65 in 2006 to 112 last year, the number of attacks committed by
intruders remained essentially flat. Instead, the increase in the number
of computer-security incidents at colleges was due to an increase in the
number of mistakes made by college officials and an increase in the number
of thefts of property, the study concluded. Dodge found that 49 colleges
unintentionally released sensitive information in 2007, up from 20 the
previous year. Meanwhile, 36 colleges reported 39 cases of theft of
college computers or storage devices last year, up from 26 cases of theft
at 24 institutions in 2006. Eugene H. Spafford, director of the Center for
Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue
University, warned against drawing too many conclusions from the study,
since it relies on other reports and has only been taken for two years.
"Campus systems continue to be prized because of high bandwidth, number of
systems (particularly student-owned), and collections of personal
information of people with good credit histories," he says.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Peter Gloor has developed Condor,
software that monitors activity on the Web to predict the future of stock
prices and election results. Condor has successfully predicted the results
of an Italian political party's internal election as well as stock market
fluctuations. Condor starts by taking a search term, such as the name of a
political candidate or a company, and running it through a Google search.
Condor then takes the URLs of the top 10 results and plugs them into the
Google search field, prefaced with the term "link:". Google then returns
the sites that link to the 10 original sites, which Condor then reinserts
into Google. Condor then maps the links between all the sites it has
found, even if they do not contain the original search term, and finds the
shortest way to get from one site to the other through the links they
contain. The more often a site is involved in moving between sites, the
higher its "betweenness" score. Condor averages the betweenness scores for
all of the sites to produce an overall score for the original search term.
The score provides some indication of popularity. In December of 2006,
Gloor entered a range of film titles from that year and found that of the
10 with the highest betweenness scores, five won Oscars, four were
nominated, and only one did not receive an award. Gloor is working on
altering Condor so that it only searches blogs or chat sites.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Jon Oberheide, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, says there
is a big security risk related to virtualization. He says that one of the
most attractive features of virtualization--the ability to spontaneously
replicate virtual servers in order to meet demand--increases the risk of
attacks such as data theft and denial of service. Oberheide attributes
this increased risk to the fact that authentication between machines is
weak when a virtual machine moves from one physical server to another, and
because virtual-machine traffic between physical machines is unencrypted.
However, there are two solutions to these problems, Oberheide says. A
short-term solution is to install hardware-based encryption on all the
physical servers that might send or receive virtual machines, while a
long-term solution is to incorporate strong authentication into virtual
machine software. Oberheide has developed a proof-of-concept tool he used
in a lab to launch man-in-the-middle attacks against virtual machines as
they moved from one physical server to another. Nemertes Research analyst
Andreas Antonopoulos says Oberheide's work is fascinating, and adds that
virtual servers face much more basic challenges. "Our entire security
infrastructure has been built around a static model, and as we're
virtualizing everything else, the virtualization of security is lagging by
a tremendous amount," he says. "That's causing real problems in
architecture decisions today."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top